On October 25, 2007, Elcomsoft Co Ltd. inMoscow, Russia filed for a US patent on a reportedly new passwordrecovery method that makes use of a video card's graphics processingunit (GPU). Elcomsoft credits the February 2007 release of the NVIDIACUDA C-Compiler and developer's kit for providing the necessarylow-level GPU access they needed to make this cryptographicadvancement. The newest NVIDIA GPUs act as multiprocessors that utilizeshared memory, cache, and multiple registers. The newest graphics cardsutilize fixed point calculations, relatively massive amounts of memory,and multiple processing units. They differ significantly from acomputer's central processing unit (CPU) in terms of theircryptanalytic processing capabilities and Elcomsoft claims to haveleveraged newer GPU architectures to improve brute force passwordcracking by a factor of 25.
Statistics from Elcomsoft state that the new method can be used toexhaustively crack an eight character pseudo-...
